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A Field Guide to Obnoxious Eating

Why We Seethe When Even the Nicest Colleagues Bring In Stinky, Noisy Food; Sardines, Anyone?

By

Sue Shellenbarger

August 24, 2011

To be filed under "What Was He Thinking?" is Paul Glen's sardine sandwich.

After going on a high-protein diet, Mr. Glen brought sardine and tuna sandwiches to his bank-consulting job and ate them at his desk. He knew the food was stinky, but he figured people would tell him if they had a problem, he says.

More people are eating at their desks these days. While we're more productive, we can be awfully annoying munching and crunching food that is sometimes smelly. Sue Shellenbarger looks at etiquette of eating at your desk on Lunch Break.

Instead, a co-worker in the next cubicle complained to her boss, who complained to the chief information officer, who complained to Mr. Glen's boss, who delivered the complaint to Mr. Glen.

Mr. Glen says he apologized immediately to his colleague in the next cubicle. From then on, he brought salads or ate lunch outside, says Mr. Glen, now chief executive of Leading Geeks, a Los Angeles management- and education-consulting company.

More than half of full-time employees in the U.S. eat at their desks at least once a week, according to a survey last year of 4,498 employees by jobs website CareerBuilder.com. And in their quest to be super-productive, never-missing-a-beat workers at their desks, office havoc can erupt. Seemingly otherwise normal, perfectly mannered, even buttoned-up executives can slurp, lick their lips or leave grubby plasticware around the office.

Becki Holmes especially hates the fumes of artificial-butter flavoring in microwave popcorn that pollute the offices of a Seattle food and beverage retailer where she works. "And you can never find the person who made the popcorn," she says.

That smell, from shelf-stable additives that produce a buttery flavor, can be unpleasant and tends to linger, says
Pamela Dalton,
an olfactory researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, a nonprofit that researches taste and smell.

She ties bad smell to a much larger mood: Smelling others' lunches in the office can make people feel as if they have lost "control over their personal environment," Dr. Dalton says. A bad or unidentified smell can "make us go on alert, distract us from what we're doing and change our mood," usually for the worse, she says.

Patricia Norma once accidentally spilled an apple pie on her computer while working through lunch at her desk at a sales and marketing training company in Houston. She dropped everything to try to salvage her keyboard, and several colleagues jumped in to help.

You Stink!

Microwave popcorn may irk your peers.
Getty Images

Common smelly foods that get the most complaints:

• Reheated fish dishes

• Fast-food french fries

• Microwave popcorn and burritos

• Sandwiches with liverwurst or onion

• Dishes with aged cheeses

Source: Pamela Dalton, Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia

Her boss, chief executive Bert Martinez, describes the scene: "All of a sudden, somebody else wants to lend a hand, and somebody else wants to lend a hand, and before you know it, we had three people trying to clean up a $20 keyboard," wasting time.

Now, Mr. Martinez keeps a big roll of plastic wrap on hand and asks employees to cover their computer keyboards when they eat. Nelson Morales, a salesman and trainer, covers his keyboard—and his tie—in plastic. "It's very comfortable," he says. He often brings in spaghetti and beans-and-rice dishes. The plastic has also reduced his dry-cleaning bill, he says.

(Ms. Norma has since left the company for another job. Her departure wasn't related to any lunch-time spills, of course.)

When Mary Miller worked in human resources for a retailer, she would break to eat lunch and co-workers would interrupt to complain about problems with other co-workers or their bosses. "People come in and plop down and start talking. They never stop to say, 'Excuse me, do you have a few minutes?' " she says.

To get some privacy, she started holding up a paperback romance novel in front of her face while she ate, she says. If co-workers "see that I'm reading, it tends to make them say, 'Oh,' and turn around." (She now happily works and eats uninterrupted as an executive coach and consultant from her home office in Annapolis, Md.)

Nelson Morales, a salesman at a Houston sales-training company, covers his keyboard with plastic to deal with spills at his desk.
Michael Stravato for Wall Street Journal

Not to be forgotten are the munchers, the crunchers, the open-mouthed, finger-licking lip-smackers. Ashley Chase, an associate editor for an environmental website in Atlanta, gets irritated when co-workers snack on "chips, nuts, anything that is super-crunchy." She says she knows everyone isn't as sensitive as she is, so she doesn't complain. Instead, she puts on her headphones and listens to music.

As much as most desk lunchers say they get more done, productivity experts challenge the idea. "Squeezing out every possible moment" in the day for work actually drains energy and reduces output, says
Tony Schwartz,
chief executive of the Energy Project, Riverdale, N.Y., an author and consultant on employee engagement.

A better route would be to take a break for lunch and return to work energized, he says. Some 109 "Take Back Your Lunch" groups have formed on Meetup.com in response to a campaign he launched last year.

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Allison Hemming, president of the Hired Guns, a 12-employee placement agency for product management, marketing, design and advertising workers in New York City, gobbled lunch at her desk for years while working as a marketing specialist at two New York investment banks.

Now, if she sees her employees working through lunch, "I get them out of their desks," encouraging them to get outside, she says. "We've seen a major boost in productivity" and sales as a result.